Always the Years Between Us
by komiket
Summary: EDI's thoughts during the last few years of Joker's life. Takes place in the post-Control universe.


EDI knew fear. Fear was, all things considered, simple to understand and accept. She understood battle, its outcomes, sacrifices, losses. She was born in conflict, designed with her processing power always focused on warfare. She had taken her first steps on battlefields and still she had chosen to spend her life serving in the military. War had always been a focal point of her life. EDI knew fear and had accepted it long ago - it was ever present, it became familiar, it united you with your comrades, kept propelling you forward. Everyone understood what you were experiencing; you didn't have to struggle to communicate it - a comfort to an intelligence that wasn't built to express emotion in the first place.

The knowledge that Jeff would be dead soon was something so much more intangible than the fear EDI had spent a lifetime dealing with so pragmatically.

There was no line of logical thought that quieted her soul the day his doctors explained that a lifetime of heavy use of medications, pushing his body to unprecedented limits and stress, and all the other various health risks that accompany Osteogenesis imperfecta were finally catching up to him. He had taken the news quietly enough - part of him was aloof, as per his usual with life changing events, another part of him seemed slightly afraid, but largely unaffected. EDI was inconsolable. The doctors had not even found something specifically wrong, how could he simply be nearing the end? Almost all the organics she'd even seen die were due to violence or specific diseases. Why did organics simply start shutting down without warning? Why were they built to being processes that would lead them to cease to function at arbitrary times? She had tried to gain answers to these questions for years, and all she'd been told is that it's "just life."

On one day that EDI had been particularly disquieted, Jeff seemed to figure out what was bothering her, without words. He took her hand and said, "Let's just enjoy how long we've still got."

Simple and effective. Easy to absorb into her daily directives.

So they did just that.

They took walks when they could - he even let her carry him at times without dispute. They told more jokes, laughed with bigger smiles, told each other how happy the other made them more often. They held each other closer, for longer. EDI had even taken to remaining within her body while Jeff slept - she used to dedicate her consciousness to other tasks during his sleeping hours, leaving her body next to him with only a single program running to answer him if he asked for her, or to roll over if needed. She had slumbered with him before, enjoying the unique form of intimacy it provided, but had typically passed on the opportunity, due to a fear of boredom.

It wasn't boring, after all. Another opportunity to continue her life long study of the man she loved was as thrilling as always, especially now that she was fighting against an unknown agent, lurking in the future, waiting to end that which she lived to protect. She found peace in counting his breaths, feeling his heart beat, the warmth of his body against hers. His continued presence, year after year, delighted her.

Every night he would put one of her hands on his chest, a continued promise he'd made that "if I stop ticking, you'll be the first to know." A sense of control over the inevitable, no mater how fabricated, soothed her nerves. The counting and documenting continued, the pattern, night after night, trained her to become lulled into a powered down state, where she could escape her waking apprehensiveness. To put it in simpler terms, she relaxed. She felt safe with him. She always felt safe with Jeff.

And so she slept with him, in the meaning of the term she wish she'd begun sooner. She regretted all the times he must've woken up, with just her body lying there and nothing inside.

She would only experience her version the first and only time she'd come out of sleep mode to find just his body left next to hers, with Jeff himself so, so far away. The fact that he had finally gone somewhere she could not follow, not compute, not even fathom, lead to the worst feedbacks she'd even experienced. She drowned in them for an unrecorded length of time, pushing her computational powers in every direction that would lead her back to a functioning state. Her self-preservation code had never been re-modified, and so all her servos punished her for his loss. She held him tighter as she tried to understand how this was goodbye.

Later, when friends would offer condolences, she would be told by almost everyone that she had done a brave and beautiful thing, watching someone grow old while she stayed motionless. She found herself agreeing, even if the comments didn't help her emotional state.

EDI knew fear. Being truly scared; however, was completely new. She now understood that fear is not something you can know. Fear _is_ the unknown. It was there all along.

But she had one thing much stronger to hold close than any concern, and that unchanging factor, the reasoning behind every piece of her logic, was Jeff. So in that way, he would never leave her alone. She would find him again…even if only in her dreams.


End file.
